


Last Year

by deltachye



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Reader-Insert, Romance, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-23 01:57:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11979690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deltachye/pseuds/deltachye
Summary: [saeyoung choi x reader/oc (interchangeable)]December: you sang at my funeral.[based off of “Last Year” by ∆ (alt-J)]





	Last Year

**Author's Note:**

> In order to turn this fic into a reader insert, download the InteractiveFics extension on the Google Chrome store (for free) here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/interactivefics/pcpjpdomcbnlkbghmchnjgeejpdlonli . Press "Need to replace something other than Y/N?". Put the name "Jin-ae" in "Value" and "Replace With" your chosen name.
> 
> Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OjkHRp2ti0

 

**❝ mississippi, come back to me. ❞**

* * *

 

_January came and took my heart away  
February felt the same_

Cold had no meaning when it was forever that way.

Saeyoung supposed that he could’ve used his riches to invest in some better heating system, but with the underground shelter he called home, warmth was leached away faster than it could be replaced. The sun, forgotten, was not one to give him aid. That old sun which had smiled upon him in childhood was like an old dream; tarnished by hopes sprung up by despair. He didn’t remember what it felt like to have sunlight kiss his skin, what with the eternal blue glow of faceless monitors to wash over him. He didn’t remember what wind felt like, tousling his hair, what with the mechanical clicks of air conditioning vents overtop. Snow was far too distant, seen only through pictures. Rain was reduced to monotonous showers. Winter and Summer and everything in-between were all the same to him.

Maybe he’d just forgotten what warmth was entirely.

The others had gone to sleep, the chat empty and undisturbed from when he’d last checked. He could understand why as his eyes slid lazily to the time. They had normal, everyday lives, and everyday things to get to at an everyday time of day. Yoosung’s crying emoticon, the last thing sent, looped over and over as he stared absentmindedly. The younger man had something like an exam tomorrow that he hadn’t studied for. If only his own problems could be considered so trivial… if only he could feel at all.

Him? Him. Another mission to ignore, another wall of text with no meaning. Ones and zeroes, left and right, wrong and… more wrongs. It was forever this way.

Stagnant.

Cold.

Days seemed to fly past as time crawled, each second an insignificant eon of the macrocosm. Nights and day were binary white numbers on a screen in his coal-black room. For all it mattered, time was a meaningless, useless construct. He was gifted, he was told, but he could scarcely tell the day apart from last year. Memory seemed to be a velveteen sheet with scatterings of faint remembrance laid across. The farther he ran his hand, the farther he went back, the more it hurt; the colder it got; until he could not bear to think any longer. It was easier to let go of it and forget entirely.

Forget what, though? For everything was just the same, anyways.

His own sleep was erratic and postponed for as long as possible. When he did, he didn’t dream very much—not anymore—but he was sure that any of those forgotten dreams would’ve done nothing but made him sadder. Spikes in monotony would’ve told him that there was more beyond the cold, and he didn’t quite believe in that—nor did he want to be tempted into it.

 _Our Father: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen._ Deliverance never came, and his weary feet wore rivets into coal blackened paths.

His prison was not made of iron bars, but red adamantine ropes of destiny. Tightly, he was bound. Sleep, an ordinary function of life that he avoided regularly, seemed to be his only relief. Purgatory, where he didn’t quite exist, was where he was freest. Perhaps it was ironic that the only time he felt alive was when his body tasted the favours of death. He might have pretended to not need sleep under the guise of work, but perhaps it was actually the fear that he loved death a little too much.

Perhaps pathetic; perhaps sad. He closed his eyes, allowing the darkness to settle over him like a lead-knit blanket. It was welcome.

Truth is cold.

 

_March, my hugs became hold-ons  
April, I huffed like porridge on the boil  
Morning May, I’m downwind from your shampoo_

The day she entered the chat was one that burnt brightly into his mind, the image burnt into the forefront of his brain like fire. He could still recall each second like individual fireworks in the coal black chasm of his memory. Her hesitancy, so genuine despite being conveyed by lifeless ones and zeroes in a constructed program—her purity, transcending the crude inadequacy of text on a screen—it took his breath away and made him feel as if he’d broken the surface of water after drowning.

He’d never thought that he’d be surprised by anybody ever again. She was human in that she wasn’t portraying the perfect front to the others. He could tell that her words weren’t deliberate or staged. Her gentle air wasn’t faked; her laughter held weight behind truthful lightheartedness; she didn’t change herself to conform to the wishes of the others. She was not like _him_.

He’d pulled up the mysterious visitor’s history as a security check, for the safety of others, but that was an excuse. His own curiosity led him down the winding path of her life. His own jealousy, his own disgusting envy, his own horrid nature led him to paw at her velveteen sheet, drinking up her life story as if it might change him. Jin-ae—it was an everyday screen name for an everyday girl. She lived an everyday life, from what he could discern, but the raw green monster of envy inside of him hated himself for wishing he could live by her side in that everyday normality.

He was quick to try and forget those qualms, expecting nothing to change about him, for nothing did. At least, that was what he believed. The excitement died away as she entered RFA, acclimating with the others and doing her best to adapt to her new role as the party coordinator. Of course, the circumstances were strange, and he would be looking into them. Of course, he was excited to be able to host another fundraiser, the selfish thing inside of him content to use the excuse of helping others to better his own existence. Yet hesitation was a strong guard.

He tried to limit his conversations with her, locking his phone far away so that he wouldn’t linger in the chats. His words danced in his head like undead spirits, hopelessly morphing themselves into ways that might earn her affections. Would she laugh if he said this? Would she still care about him if he said that? When she wasn’t around, he still thought of her, and that brought fear.

He focused on his work for the first time in ages, desperately clinging to the keyboard as things began to change. He’d slipped up; he’d said something wrong, something that _7-0-7~!_ would never have even thought of. She had noticed, he knew she had—and although she was considerate enough to pretend that it hadn’t happened at all for his sake, it was horrifying to know that she knew, too. He turned to those things again, grey smoke languidly crawling along his ceiling like the tendrils of some deep sea monster, taking memory with it—and yet, he couldn’t forget.

He didn’t _want_ to forget, anymore.

Showers bring flowers and spring broke out of his winter.

He sent Jin-ae a private message, something stupid he’d just thought of to check in on her wellbeing. The reply was immediate. Something meaningless, but she would never know how he hung onto her words like stones on a cliff, saving him from the void below. It was selfish of him to lie to her, pretending that things were fine, greedily scattering hopeful seeds that she would come by and water and give life to. He’d asked her to call him Saeyoung, abandoning ‘Luciel’ like it would help him abandon his past. It didn’t, and yet, she made things feel like they were better nonetheless.

Movement from the corner of his eye—he saw her hand curl as she waved to the camera in the apartment, a wry smile on her pretty face as her phone rested in the other hand. A smile bloomed across his lips and he had to look away as if she could see.

 _Lacuna_ , at last…

…yet happiness does not come without the inevitable end.

 

_June, I learnt to count to ten in Japanese_  
Dry July, like wiping skin from my skull  
Instead I visited family  
They told me I was special  
Hm.

Cliffs taper to valleys, and negative space is filled. He tried; he really did.

His efforts had never been quite good enough all throughout his life.

Despite that, he had changed, somewhat. Not enough. But he’d gone off, seeking the company of one of the others. It was a desperate reach for a lifeline, but he would never have admitted that; he didn’t need anybody to waste their time worrying after him. Especially not her, when he could tell that she already did. For her sake, he’d try to change a bit more.

He felt guilty for taking advantage of Yoosung’s innocence. The boy admired him too much, and idolized him, he knew. Saeyoung wanted to tell him that he was wrong in his idiotic idealism. Saeyoung wanted to reveal to Yoosung just what kind of sins lay under the depths of his cross. Treats and a carefree attitude meant nothing when the past was not quite buried at rest.

But he showed none of it, greeting him with a usual joke and snarky remark.

**Yoosung: I need to stop gaming T_T I wish I could have a job like yours and stay at home on the computer all day… orz**

He knew nothing. It was better that way, and yet, Saeyoung’s heart lurched with grief for it.

**707: lolol. You’ll get nothing done if you keep being a loser.**

**Yoosung: >:( Maybe you’re the real loser!  
** Yoosung: I’m kidding. You’re all mysterious about it, but you really do a lot for RFA, don’t you?  
Yoosung: You act like it’s nothing, but things are getting dangerous;; so it’s good that you’re protecting Jin-ae! ^^;

The text of her name seemed to be seared into his heart. The damn thing kicked up when the younger man mentioned her, and hot blood pounded through his body, a painful reminder of his unwanted mortality. Saeyoung forgot what he wrote immediately after sending it—probably something stupid, to set off Yoosung, and he put his head into his hands. Weight fell onto his soul along with his failure.

Naïve, Yoosung was, and young. Yet not quite pure. Rika’s death had cut him deeply. Saeyoung knew—everybody did. Yoosung had been able to put up this front of healing, playing games and complaining about college life like any other day, but Saeyoung knew what that boy’s tears felt like against his skin. Would he cry like that again when Saeyoung left?

Would Jin-ae?

His mouth tasted of iron and he spat it aside, having bit down on his lip so hard that he’d drawn blood. What good was being a genius when he could not figure out the path to happiness? What good was counting time—one mississippi, two mississippi, three—when the seconds meant nothing at all? What good was the smarts of counting to ten in 84 languages when he couldn’t bring himself to say _saranghae_ in his mother tongue to her—well, what damned good was he?

Saeyoung had cared deeply for Rika and Jihyun, and had always harboured a faint sense of resentment that they’d been able to live their lives so differently from him. And yet, he had never felt guiltier for his jealousy of Rika than now.

Forgiveness with God meant little to him; he prayed that he would have Jin-ae’s.

 

_Augustus came and stabilised me with my father’s pain  
Relieving drug, ‘diazepam’  
Life floats away_

Vanderwood was oddly compassionate in his own way. It wasn’t as if the man suddenly became openly emotional, and treated Saeyoung very much the same as always. Saeyoung could appreciate Vanderwood’s stiff, detached demeanor. It meant that there was one less person to care about him. He supposed he was wrong in that assumption. Saeyoung would never have noticed, too, if not for the bottle of pills on the table.

He called Vanderwood on the private line, letting the fellow agent know he had forgotten his medication at his house. Vanderwood feigned obvious confusion before hanging up hurriedly. Saeyoung could see through the other man’s lies, not because the agent was a poor liar, but because of what was left behind so neatly on the middle of his coffee table. The part of the prescription label containing the patient’s name had been torn off cleanly, leaving the drug name: diazepam.

Vanderwood had also left the directions on the label, clearly intending for Saeyoung to take them. Saeyoung felt a wry pang of respect for his colleague, but also wondered how far he had gone if that man of all people recognized his pain. He could only hope that Jin-ae still saw him as 707. She deserved more than the shell of what he was. Turning to leave, he did so, but the pill bottle remained and haunted him.

For days, the orange pill bottle lay at the bottom of his trash can, steadily buried with chip bags and drink cans. The four syllables brought only painful memories to him, for when his mother had not yet turned to alcohol, it had been diazepam. She’d chewed them like candies, rattling the packages with shaky hands to her own deranged beat. But medicine was more expensive than booze, and they’d faded out of his memory with a sour taste to their image.

It was a confusing sequence of events that led him to dig through the garbage, sitting the pill bottle on his countertop. He couldn’t quite remember what had spurred him to rescue it. He’d thought that he wouldn’t take any at all, in spite to Vanderwood, but he stared. The orange seemed to burn into his retinas.

Finally, he tipped the bottle over. The pills were blue, looking different outside of the coloured plastic. He scraped one, two, and three out, lining the small circular tablets into a triangle. He eyed the rest which had pooled out of the pill bottle’s open mouth. Seven was a lucky number…

But not yet. He downed the three with sugary soda, knowing full well that he’d gone one over the number on the label. For now, it would be a toe over the line, but soon… soon, he would be brave enough to jump. For now, Jin-ae stood in the back of his mind, sighing deeply with disappointment. He was more afraid of that than Death’s clammy hands.

Sinking to his knees dizzily, he hoped that one day, she could forgive his weakness. His body light, his spirit heavy, he thought only of the name he loved as he fell hard into deep sleep.

 

_October, I swam back for my birthday  
Firework display in a cafeteria of my old school  
Happier in my cold, black sleep in my cold, deep bed_

_December, you sang at my funeral…_

He lived on, tiredly, but alive.

Jumin had asked for nothing in regard to his birthday, so celebrations were limited to congratulatory texts on the app. Saeyoung was thankful for that; he hadn’t been able to bear to see anybody in a long while. He had been so sure of himself, but that resolve faltered when he saw the name Jin-ae pop up on his phone like a stern admonition. The text had been a reply to the chat, and not directed to him at all, but he had lost his courage at the thought of her face.

In any case, he didn’t want to ruin future birthdays for Jumin; if he was not to see the rest of them, he at least would hope that Jumin would remember his birthday fondly, and without the scent of burnt incense to overwhelm that. But what about her, who would surely remember him and grieve, no matter the day?

Saeyoung’s love for Jin-ae ran deep. It was pathetic of him to be here, scrolling through her old texts, savouring each one. He knew that, and yet he sat, tired eyes absorbing past memories. He’d saved each phone call, each moment with her, knowing that when his year ended, he’d have to end it with her. It was almost too much to bear, that thought. It was almost enough to force him to keep his head up over the freezing cold water.

But it was not her fault that he was sinking. Jin-ae, no matter how much he loved her, could not save him from himself. Nobody could. When he couldn’t love her the way she deserved, for fear that he would hurt her; that was the real agony. She was sweet, but far too kind. She loved him despite his misgivings, and for that, he would have to forgive her. But he could never forgive himself for the harm that would come to her for the innocent reason of loving him.

He never believed that he would go on to Heaven, and his faith was feeble at best. Still, he had some belief in God, and he prayed less for himself and more for Him to watch over her. Now that it was time, he hoped that he would be protecting her. If God would make his son an angel, he’d shelter her with his wings. If it be from the depths of Hell, or the void, or beyond, his thoughts would always revolve around her smile.

He knew that Jin-ae might never forgive him, and that thought struck his heart with cold fear. And yet, he watched each monitor die as his computers shut down for the first time, their whirs silenced. He had to believe that she would be safer without him.

He’d programmed a message to send a few days from now. She would surely try to save him if she knew, for she was good, but he couldn’t let that happen. She had done the best she could, but he was tired beyond relief. It was his turn to take care of her in the only way he knew how. Saeyoung was not deserving of happiness, but Jin-ae had gifted it to him nonetheless.

The room was dark and cold and silent, but Saeyoung felt no fear. It was rare for that to happen, and he owed that to her. A blissful smile spread across his dry lips as he turned his face upwards, eyes shut for his last sleep. The darkness was less oppressive now and welcomed him, like warm open arms. He could imagine Jin-ae’s face upon the comforting touch. Up above, red fireworks crackled, his heart pounding with each beautiful memory that Jin-ae had painted across his miserable life.

His last few moments on this Earth had been diamond stars on velvet, thanks to her. His first and last true love. He could never thank her enough for it. He could only hope that one day, she would move on from him, and be happier.

 

_If it’s depths to your rivers, I’ve picked one for you_  
_Oh, greedy with Ss but equalled by Is_  
_If it’s stones for your pockets, I’ve collected a few_  
_To hold you down_  
_To hold you down_

“It was last year that I saw him in person.”

Jin-ae looked up to the teal-haired man, her eyes fluttering down to his sunglasses before they fell back to the green grass that poked up from underneath white snow. The melange of colours seemed to spin in her head and her eyes shut, pained. She kept silent, not trusting herself to speak.

“It was his last year, wasn’t it?” Jihyun continued, moving to stand by her side. His voice was low and soft, as if not to disturb somebody sleeping, but he needn’t worry. Saeyoung Choi would not be waking up.

“Yes,” she finally breathed, her voice weak as it broke in her throat. She swiped tears from her reddened face before they hit the ground, hot in the winter air. She faced upwards at the sky now, looking distantly upon wispy clouds as snow fell from them like God’s own frozen tears.

“You sang beautifully,” he commented. His hand fell against her shoulder, and she didn’t move—she had wished too hard that the touch belonged to Saeyoung—and in response, she sighed.

“It’s what… he asked of me. He asked that I...” She inhaled shakily. “That I not cry. He wanted everybody to be happy, here. To remember him well.”

“That sounds like him.”

“Yes.” She finally turned, grimacing at Jihyun as the other man looked forwards, down at the gravestone. “The others told me that they lost Rika in this way.”

“…do you resent him?” he asked, ignoring the statement. The low tenor of his voice shook with audible grief. Jin-ae had lost the one she loved, but Jihyun had lost two. Wounds were raw. His eyes, obscured by dark glass, reflected the orange embers of dying incense.

Jin-ae did not press the subject and turned, looking down upon Saeyoung’s still face in the photograph. Wryly, she smiled, the expression not meeting her eyes.

“I don’t, no.”

“So you forgive him?”

“…no, I don’t forgive him.” Jin-ae pressed her sleeve to her face, turning and walking away, leaving Jihyun to stare after her. Saeyoung’s photograph watched her go as well, the captured smile looking sad as she did.

“I love him.”

 

_Mississippi, come back to me_  
_Oh, Mississippi, from your cold black sleep_  
_Oh, Mississippi_  
_Come back to me_

**Author's Note:**

> Read this elsewhere: https://goo.gl/r8qTkn


End file.
